In the Night of Time (62 page)

“I didn't have to risk anything. He was dead and I kept looking for him.”

H
E WAS DEAD,
and for several days early in September Ignacio Abel searched for him in vain, wandering from one end of Madrid to the other, looking suspicious in his light suit and tie and neatly folded handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket among the men with unshaven faces in unbuttoned shirts and blue coveralls who filled the streets and café terraces, the young men who carried rifles over their shoulders and wore pistols and cartridge belts around their waists, demanding papers or ordering passersby to put up their hands. That morning he told Señorita Rossman to wait until he returned, and if he learned anything he'd telephone her; he showed her where the kitchen was in case she wanted something to eat, though there was little food left in the cupboard or refrigerator. Throughout the day he thought of her, imagining her in the same position in which he'd left her, sitting at the dining room table in front of the glass of water, waiting for his return or a telephone call, crushed by a grief that when transmitted to him changed into guilt, a bottomless remorse for not having helped her and Professor Rossman as much as he should have, helped them with true conviction and not out of pity, perhaps turning in a timely way to influential friends. Señorita Rossman's desperate overconfidence in coming to him for help led him to an unrealistic sense of resolve. He leafed through his pocket diary for names, addresses, and telephone numbers; with her present he made calls that weren't answered (the telephone lines weren't working or phones rang in empty houses or abandoned offices). With a decisive air he put on his jacket and tie and placed his wallet and keys in his pocket but didn't know where to go, whom to ask for help. Since the hot July night when he'd looked for Judith Biely in a Madrid that had become alien to him, he'd lived in a state of lethargy, a sort of convalescence, in the empty apartment, going every day to his office in University City, now deserted except for patrols of militiamen, or people who stole building materials, or groups, almost always women, who walked the empty lots at first light to search among the previous night's dead. Toward the middle of August, large families who'd fled to Madrid before the advancing enemy army camped in some of the unfinished buildings: waves of refugees with wooden-wheeled carts and donkeys and mules, bent under the weight of possessions they'd attempted to save: mattresses, furniture, metal bed frames, cages of chickens. They lit their fires and cooked their pots of food in the half-completed lobbies, just as they did in public gardens in the heart of Madrid or under the arches of metro stations. Their goats and sheep grazed on the weeds of future sports fields where corpses would randomly appear, hands tied behind their backs. Packs of boys with shaved heads chased one another up and down the staircases and abandoned scaffolding until they bumped into a corpse, the boldest boys daring to go through the pockets or remove an article of clothing in good condition. As on so many mornings when he left for his office, with purposeless obstinacy that at least allowed him the deception of a certain degree of normality, Ignacio Abel told Señorita Rossman not to worry. The porter, now in a proletarian coverall and beret, greeted him as unctuously as when he wore blue livery and a visored cap. “Still no news about the señora and your children, Don Ignacio? I wouldn't worry. As I say, things are calmer in the Sierra, even if they're on the other side, and it's healthier for the children. And a summer away from Madrid is sure to do the señora good.” The porter said this knowingly: he'd learned the reason Adela spent the last two weeks of June in a sanatorium—she didn't have weak lungs. He smiled, leaning forward and perhaps calculating the possibility of denouncing him now, since he knew that Ignacio Abel, though he'd saved himself once, wasn't invulnerable. “I see the señor has had a visitor,” said the porter. “The foreign señorita asked for you and I let her up because I remembered seeing her when she came to give your children lessons. The truth is she looked like someone who's had some sorrow, but these days who doesn't have troubles?” He proffered the insinuation along with a cautious hand: he'd close his hand around the offered coin just as he'd clutch at a confidence that might be of benefit to him and perhaps harmful to the one who'd formulated it, his old status as gossip elevated in the new era to that of expert informer.

 

He looked for Negrín in the Café Lion and was told he should look for him at the Workers' Cooperative on Calle Piamonte, or at the War Ministry. His usual activity accelerated by the war, Negrín had always just left the place where Abel had almost found him. “Don Juan comes and goes all day,” said the man who shined shoes at the café and had an undying devotion to Negrín. “If he isn't on his way up to the Sierra with his car full of bread and canned food for the boys in the militias, then he's at a field hospital telling the nurses how to bandage wounds. You know how he is—that man never stops. And when he does have some free time, he comes here for me to shine his shoes and to drink down a mug of beer in one gulp. Too bad we don't get the fresh prawns anymore that he likes so much. What a man. Things would've gone better for us if he'd been president when the insurgents rebelled. Though now you hear rumors that they're going to name him to something big, a minister at least. What an honor. I tell him I'd like to be twenty years younger so I could go to the front and fight, and he tells me, ‘Agapito, if what you know how to do well is clean shoes, then clean shoes, it's a noble trade. Things would be better for us Spaniards if instead of all of us talking so much, we worked harder at our trades.' Would you like me to give him a message?” the shoeshine man asked Ignacio Abel. Hanging on the post office was an enormous half-torn poster of militiamen advancing, brandishing rifles with bayonets against a horizon of burned houses. The revolution was an apotheosis of typographies in strong colors, the war a catalogue of victories announced or predicted by newspapers in headlines that ended in exclamation points, and illustrated with pictures in photogravure of groups of ever-victorious volunteers raising rifles at the top of rugged crags or towers in towns just taken from the enemy. Ignacio Abel crossed the Castellana, which reeked of manure fermenting in the summer heat. Under the trees along the central paths, evacuees from the villages had hung their canvas tarps and made their fires, their donkeys tied to the trees. Where will they go when the cold weather begins and all of this isn't over? How will it be possible to house and feed them if they keep arriving in increasing numbers, fleeing the enemy no one is stopping except in the fantasy of newspaper headlines and radio news reports? Where will the blankets come from, the winter uniforms, the boots to equip the militias who are now fighting bare-chested? He was stupefied to discover that without the links provided by his marriage to Adela and his affair with Judith Biely, he was almost totally lacking in social connections, a hermit who suddenly leaves his enclosure and knows nothing of the outside world. The relationships he'd established at work didn't extend beyond the office, hadn't evolved into friendships. Except for Judith, he didn't recall ever having an intimate conversation with anyone. The cordiality he shared with Moreno Villa and Negrín was characterized by a strict reserve. A mixture of personal arrogance and keen class insecurity had always kept him at a distance from most of his fellow architects. Going around Madrid in search of Professor Rossman, stripped of the confidence his work, his family, even his lost lover had given him, he experienced his isolation as impotence, a lack of an anchor that had moved him away from things long before the city—the entire country—was set adrift by the upheaval of the military insurgency and a war. How solitary his life had been, an only child, then an orphan, entrusted to shadowy guardians, protected not so much by his intellectual abilities and determination to study as by the foresight of his father, who knew he was sick and saved money and took the steps necessary to continue protecting his son when he was no longer there, so he wouldn't have to leave secondary school, so he could support himself at the university, watched over by his parents in the fulfillment of a destiny they had apportioned to him with their sacrifice. “My son, you'll be so alone,” his mother said, touching his face with a hand deformed by work, in the provincial hospital bed where she lay dying. Her hand in his, grasping it, and one by one he had to loosen her fingers before letting it rest on the bed sheet. Only now did Ignacio Abel relive in memory the afternoon more than thirty years earlier when he'd walked from the East Cemetery to the dark porter's lodging on Calle Toledo after burying his mother.

If he hurried, if he was lucky, perhaps he could still save Professor Rossman. He knocked on the doors of quasi-official agencies and elegant houses that had been seized and, he'd been told, were now secret prisons. In the courtyards, car engines roared and men in civilian clothes armed with rifles and large pistols tucked diagonally between the shirt and waistband of their trousers blocked his path and subjected him to interrogations that didn't always end when he opened his wallet to show his credentials: his Socialist Party and General Union of Workers membership cards, the safe-conduct issued to him so he could continue visiting the suspended construction sites at University City. He said Professor Rossman's name, explained his status as an eminent foreign anti-Fascist refugee in Spain, and showed the photograph his daughter had given him. He caught looks of possible recognition, gestures of complicity. He put the photo away after receiving a negative reply and continued searching: perhaps he ought to ask at the Academy of Fine Arts, at the State Security Office, at the police station on Calle Fomento. “This guy has the face of a dead man,” someone said to him, laughing. “You should look for him in the morgue, or on the San Isidro meadow. They have a picnic there every night.” He knocked on the doors of palaces decorated now by red or red-and-black flags, their façades covered with layer upon layer of propaganda posters. He made his way along narrow corridors filled with tobacco smoke, saw fatigued, garrulous, unshaven men talking on the phone, dictating lists of names to secretaries, all of them pulled along by a nervous urgency in which the presence of Ignacio Abel was an inconvenience: his insistence on making inquiries regarding someone no one knew anything about, repeating a name he had to spell over and over again, showing a photo that elicited an automatic negative response. In a salon with large balconies overlooking the Paseo de la Castellana, he approached with instinctive meekness a table with legs carved into lion's claws, where a harried group of men, some wearing a suit and tie and with an official air and flanked by stenographers, judged or heard cases and examined papers. They passed around the photograph of Professor Rossman as if doubting its authenticity. One of them handed it back, shook his head, and gestured to an armed man in plain clothes sitting on a balcony. The guard seized Ignacio Abel's arm and forced him out of the hall. “If I were you, I'd stop asking so many questions. Maybe this friend of yours turns out to be an insurgent and gets you in trouble.” As he walked down the staircase, he passed a group of militiamen pushing a man in handcuffs up the stairs, hitting him. For a moment their eyes met. In the man's eyes was a plea for help; Ignacio Abel looked away.

 

He returned to the Workers' Cooperative, and the sentry at the door told him Negrín had just left but had gone to a place nearby, the Socialist commissary on Calle Gravina. Negrín was loading cardboard boxes filled with foodstuffs and beverages into his car, wiping away sweat with a handkerchief, which he then stuffed into the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Help me, Abel, don't just stand there,” he said with a peremptory gesture, not surprised to see him.

The two of them filled the trunk with canned food, sausages, sacks of potatoes. On the back seat were cases of beer and demijohns of wine wrapped in blankets.

“Don't think badly of me, Ignacio. I'm not seizing all this food, and I won't pay the comrades in the commissary with IOUs, like our heroic revolutionary patrols.”

The manager handed Negrín a long bill, and Negrín went over it with the point of a tiny pencil held between his large fingers. From a wallet held together by a rubber band he took out a handful of banknotes and paid the manager. He was already in the car and had started the motor when he told Ignacio Abel to get in and said goodbye to the commissary manager by holding his arm out the window with his fist clenched, in the same efficient way he'd extend it to signal a turn.

“Do you want me to drop you somewhere, Abel? I'm off to the Sierra to bring some food to the boys in the regiment my son Rómulo enlisted in. It's a disgrace—there are no regular supplies of anything. They send those brave kids to the front and then don't remember to bring them ammunition or food or blankets. If they don't have enough trucks for food and ammunition, how come they're still parading them through Madrid?” Boxed into a space that was too small, Negrín gestured over the wheel as he drove with abrupt accelerations and stops on the narrow streets, carried along by a mixture of indignation and enthusiasm. “So instead of despairing and wasting time by calling and asking the authorities to do something, I decided to take drastic action and do it myself. It's not much, but it's better than nothing, and besides, it keeps me busy. Come to think of it, how about helping me with your car?”

“It was requisitioned, Don Juan. I left it at the mechanic's a few days before all this began and haven't seen it since.”

“You've used precisely the right phrase: ‘all this.' What are we living through? A war, a revolution, sheer absurdity, a variation on traditional Spanish summer fiestas? ‘All this.' We don't even know what name to give it. Did you hear what Juan Ramón Jiménez called it? When he was safe and sound in America, of course. A ‘mad tragic fiesta,' that's what Juan Ramón called it. The people's great triumph. But he and Zenobia, just in case, rushed to put some distance between themselves and ‘all this.' Do you know they were about to take him for a ride, as we say now? It's a shame how things like this enter our vocabulary.”